Tools for Scrum and Agile Project Management
Redmine is a popular open source project management web application written using the Ruby on Rails framework. This software is more oriented towards a traditional approach for project management with Gantt charts and calendar than Agile, Scrum or Kanban. However, the Redmine architecture allows however creating plugins to add additional features. The development of a number of Agile, Scrum, Kanban and Lean plugins has therefore been started in these past years.
Even if Agile approaches favor collocated teams, distributed Scrum teams are more common that what you might think. Many Agile software development teams are based on a virtual organization.
The first thing to say is that the term “Planning Poker®” is a registered trademark of Mountain Goat Software, the Mike Cohn company. This is why this agile planning practice could be sometimes names differently: scrum poker, agile poker, etc. This article presents a list of free and open source planning poker tools and plugins that are also directly available as online tools.
If the development of open source Scrum tools was in vogue some years ago, a lot of these projects have now been abandoned. Some are still active, but this is because their development is sponsored by a commercial hosted option. There is however an alternative to manage your Agile software development projects if you have a low budget… and a small team. Some providers of commercial Scrum tools provide a free version of their software, often with some limitations.
Parabol is an agile meeting tool that helps remote teams run guided retrospective, check-in and Sprint Poker meetings. Parabol’s structured format and built-in templates make it easy for facilitators to run a great agile meeting – no matter if you’re a pro or just starting out. It’s free to use for up to two teams.
In this article we’d like to share our views on the distinct advantages an online retrospective offers over traditional retrospectives for distributed Agile teams, and what to look for in a remote retrospective tool.
If most of the open source projects for Scrum tools have ended being transformed in a limited offer that supports a main commercial product, this has not been the case for Kanban. The simplicity of the Kanban approach has allowed open source software developers to create and maintain Kanban tools based on various platforms.
